What is Marketing Automation? Quick guide w/ examples!

VIDEO SCRIPT

What is Marketing Automation, and how does it work? This is what we will talk about in today's video.

If you're new here, I'm Thalita, and I've been working in Digital Marketing since 2012, exclusively with Marketing Automation since 2018.

You know, it's funny to see people's reactions when I mention that I work with Marketing Automation. It depends a lot on who I'm talking to, of course. If I am talking to someone who is familiar with Marketing or Tech, they usually ask, "Okay, but how does it actually work?" or "What do you do exactly?" But if I am talking to someone who is not from these areas, they just look at me like "marketing... what?".

Marketing Automation is a relatively new field, so it's understandable why people have so many questions about it. Let's talk a little bit about what marketing automation is, in simple terms (and with examples!).

Before talking about the definition of marketing automation, I think it's helpful to step back a little bit and talk about how Marketing Automation was born, so to say. I promise this will be quick and will help you understand the concept better.

A brief history of Marketing Automation

Before the internet, people used to promote their products or services in the "offline world," right? Marketers used billboards, TV and radio ads, direct mail, phone calls, and other types of "offline methods" to sell their products or services. After the internet became available to the public in the 90s, people started exploring different ideas to reach consumers through the internet.

This is when we see the rise of digital marketing channels. You're probably familiar with most of them. Social media, email marketing, paid advertisement, search engine marketing (what we call SEO), are some of these channels.

As businesses started relying more and more on the Internet to sell their products or services, the amount of work that a marketer has to do has increased over the years! To give you an idea, a marketer working in 1995 would have spent their day creating pretty basic email campaigns and developing simple websites... Nowadays, a marketer working at a business juggles many more channels and work!

Optimizing the website for search engines, creating content, managing social media channels, sending out email marketing campaigns, running paid marketing campaigns, creating marketing reports... Nowadays, the checklist of a marketer is infinite!

With so much to do and so little time, the need to automate things came. In the 2000s, we saw a rise in platforms created to supply this demand of helping marketers achieve more in less time. The first players in the market were Eloqua and Marketo. The market has grown a lot since then; nowadays, we have Salesforce, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and other names.

What is Marketing Automation?

The term "marketing automation" was coined around the 2000s to describe these software platforms we were discussing just now. These platforms help marketers and businesses AUTOMATE marketing tasks and become more efficient.

Let me give you an example of Marketing Automation: You know when you go to a website, fill out the Contact us form, and receive an automated email reply a few minutes after? This is an example of Marketing Automation. The marketer is not manually sending emails to every single person that fills out the contact us form. These "autoresponder emails" were set up using a marketing automation platform.

Marketing Automation platforms help businesses automate repetitive and manual tasks, such as sending emails, for example. There are many other things you can automate in a business:

• Communication with the audience (such as social media scheduling, content publishing, emails, and so on).

• Internal business processes (such as the handover from the sales department to the customer support department, for example).

In essence, marketing automation platforms handle the boring work and give the marketer "mental space" to focus on what really matters. The cool thing is that Marketing Automation supports all the other fields inside Digital Marketing.

How do you do Marketing Automation?

It depends on which platform you're using. I work with a platform called HubSpot. Inside HubSpot, you build what's called a workflow to set up an automation process. This is a workflow example.

If someone comes from the contact us form, then send them an email. Cool, right?

Is Marketing Automation a job?

Absolutely! Businesses that are unfamiliar with Marketing Automation or don't have this skill in-house look for professionals specialized in Marketing Automation. It's a financially rewarding field of marketing you can specialize in.

In 2018, I decided to specialize in Marketing Automation with HubSpot. Essentially, I help businesses automate their marketing tasks by using HubSpot as a platform.

If you want to learn more about the demand in the market, go to LinkedIn and type "Marketing Automation" in the jobs section. You'll see examples of businesses looking for people who specialize in this skill.

I hope this video helped you have a better understanding of what marketing automation is.